The truth is, nobody here "worships" science, it's impossible. Nobody "worships" a model, regardless of how attractive, it's just a model, with no spiritual content whatever.
True. But there are two kinds of meaning for the word 'science'. The first is as you describe, a useful methodology for testing a hypothesis.
But there is a second kind, which I call SCIENCE!
SCIENCE! is what Neil deGrasse Tyson does when he takes what is normally a neutral term that describes a useful methodology and stretches it all out of proportion in order promote a pop political agenda of pure materialism and atheism.
SCIENCE! is my shorthand for this kind of word abuse. ('Climate change' = AGW is another example.) It is a rhetorical bludgeon used by NdGT, Bill Nye, Ricky Gervais, Richard Dawkins and others to attack any faith belief - other than their own - by asserting that only things that can be seen or felt actually exist (which is itself also a faith belief). It is the same terminological sleight of hand that Engels and Marx had used to promote dialectical materialism. 'Marxism is scientific!'
SCIENCE! directly attacks Judeo-Christian beliefs by design. It attacks the beliefs that enabled free scientific inquiry in the first place (that God is a rational being who loves us and made a Creation that operates according to logical rules, so by learning more about how Creation works we can learn more about Him). SCIENCE! shuts it all down in favor of strict authoritarianism and credentialism in the service of hard materialism and marxist ideology.
That meaning has a long and distinguished ancestry, beginning with "natural philosophy", becoming "natural science" around the time of our Founding Fathers.
That's the term and meaning I'm here to defend, along with our Founders who used & understood it.
In their minds, and mine, "natural science" is simply the study of God's handiwork, to learn something about how He did what He did.
It's first & foremost methodological rule is: only natural explanations for natural processes.
In other words, science by design and definition does not touch on anything divine or supernatural.
Gideon7: "But there is a second kind, which I call SCIENCE!"
Sure, and the big, super-educated terms for that are: "metaphysical naturalism", "philosophical naturalism" or "ontological naturalism".
These terms, which also go back centuries, represent a religious commitment to the methodological assumptions of natural science.
Put simply, they mean: atheism.
Yes, I "get" that people like our FRiend editor-surveyor refuse to distinguish between the methodologically natural science of our Founders and the metaphysical atheism of today's scientific priesthood.
So that's why I'm here, to point out such distinctions.